


Été

by Ethike_arete



Series: Les Saisons [2]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: David's homoerotic art, Kissing, M/M, Marat's language, Oaths & Vows, references to The Iliad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-26 21:41:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15671850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethike_arete/pseuds/Ethike_arete
Summary: Just as in the Convention, the club, so too Saint-Just’s voice suffused every corner of the studio.  It curled warm and rich around the whorls of Maxime’s ear and settled in them like deafness.  He heard nothing else, attuned to Antoine’s voice as Brount to the whistle.Covering the period leading to the Fall of the Girondins to shortly after Marat's murder.  Robespierre struggles with conflicting desires for peace and rest, while being no less committed to the Revolution.  Rated M for the second chapter.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [Été](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16522262) by [yrko69](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yrko69/pseuds/yrko69)



> The quotations separating parts of the chapter all come from _The Iliad_.

**Paris, 1793**  
  
 

**Sing, Goddess, of the rage of Peleus' son Achilles…**

  
  
There were so very many times, in the long Spring of 1793, when it almost became possible to forget war and its churning slaughter, the shifting tides of factionalism, the revolt in the Vendée.  Perhaps, Maximilien Robespierre thought, such things as tumbrels and guillotines, the Ça Ira and sans-culottes, the endless flurry of bitter argument in pamphlets and papers simply became unnoticeable after a time.  A part of life that faded into the background, unnoticed as the gossamer wisps of cloud on summer mornings.  Perhaps, as Seneca would have it, human nature was simply designed to find pleasure and contentment even amid violence and discontent.

Or perhaps only Maxime had found it since Saint-Just first arrived in Paris, and he were now succumbing to torpor like a fly happily drowning in honey.  Peace, its painted facade at least, as thin and insubstantial as a stage setting, sang a Siren’s lure.  _How,_ went its delicate tune, _can you tarry with fear and hound yourself with conspiracy.  Be at ease.  Love._

To suggest that only the young deputy called Maxime's soul in those lengthening days would, however, be an inadequate explanation for the change that had come over him.  Returning to Rousseau’s guidance, he was called outside far more often than usual, almost as though returning to his languorous days in the Rosati.  At times he went with only Brount as his companion, or managed a picnic with Camille and his family.  They were always on safer ground with Lucile and Horace present, providing pleasant excuse not to tread too far down paths of certain memories.  It was, after all, no longer safe to journey in some parts of their hearts.  

Out again, later, amidst markets swollen with Spring harvest: plump, sweet berries and tart rhubarb, asparagus and eggplants, carrots with the good earth of France still clinging to their orange skins.  If there were sometimes a scent of blood, it never lingered long and was soon washed away by the showers that occasionally caught Maxime out of doors and soaked him to the skin.  

As summer neared still closer, vendors in the Palais Royale began selling shaved ice.  Maxime, unable to resist its sweetness,  found himself attending their stalls under the guise of introducing Augustin to this hitherto unknown pleasure.  Or, on days when his ulcerated legs finally relented in their agonies, he stood watching tumblers, magicians and pantomimes to perform their tales later much to the delight of the Duplays.  At night there were the visits of Couthon, David and even Danton.  There was Augustin teaching the girls card games and Maxime reading aloud chapters from _The Iliad_ , which Couthon declared ‘strikingly radical in its approach to King Agamemnon (a point that Saint-Just, when present, could argue endlessly).  There was Saint-Just, always Saint-Just, reciting Racine and Molière; Saint-Just singing patriotic songs in his lovely, broken tenor, or sometimes the innocent pastoral love songs of his own region. In those instants and even much later, while he lay abed, Maxime flattered himself that the deputy’s gaze had lighted more often on his face, scarred and worn though it was, than any others’.

At some point, as the earth took on the blushing promise of a long summer, he and Antoine began to leave the city on occasion.  They took their work to a park on the edge of Paris where they could be both unknown and undisturbed.  On particularly warm days, Maxime left Antoine to his writings and then, once sure he wouldn’t see, removed his stockings and plunged his aching legs into a stream still cold from the melt.  Would come back to find Antoine, coat and waistcoat long discarded, the loose sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbows, the very picture of an Émile grown into the full bloom of manhood.

It was in the midst of May that all changed.  Maxime could not say what it was, precisely, only that it came suddenly.  They had been at the Jacobin Club almost all night, listening to Marat’s snarl, and Maxime had therefore snatched not so much as an hour of sleep.  When they came to the park he dozed beneath the sprawling shade of a great oak.  Slept and dreamed of Lafayette and Louis Capet, of blood on cobblestones.  They ripped Maxime apart with taloned hands.  Forced him- oh, horror!- to watch as they held Antoine’s head and forced a small silver spoon, dripping with Maxime’s flesh and gore, between his gentle lips.  Maxime woke with his friend’s pleas still echoing in his ears, his stomach roiling.  With blessed relief he found Antoine pacing like a caged wolf, papers clenched in his hands while he delivered some speech in hushed, oft-amended tones.

“Forgive me,” Antoine said.  “I thought to leave you sleeping while I worked on my Constitution.”

“Is it now yours alone?” he teased.

“For all the attention others have displayed, it ought to be.”  He pushed the papers, a scrawled mess as always, into Maxime’s hands.  “Read.  This is my very heart.”

 _And in my hands._   It was then, seeking to absent himself from the intensity of Antoine’s gaze and the tension between them, unbreached, since the previous year, that he noticed his friend’s state.  His cravat had loosened its noose-like grip to bare the pale stretch of his throat.  His curls were disordered, and one shirtsleeve remained at his elbow while the other, ink-stained, had slipped down to cover part of his hand.  It did not at all mend the situation. 

“You stare,” Antoine said, a little peevishly.

“I thought…”

“Of what?”

He laughed.  “That Augustin is right to call you Achilles.”

Antoine’s smile, then, came bright and sharp as victory.  Maxime saw the rejoinder before it came, having failed in his own defense.

“Then who, in tales of Ilium, does that make you?”

“Their particular friendship ends poorly,” Maxime replied.  “I would hope ours does not end in death.”

“There were gods and kings in ancient tales, to drive men's fortunes.”

“There is Brissot and the Girondins now.”

“Not,” Saint-Just said darkly.  “For long.”

 _At least,_ Maxime thought, _no one need die for the Achilles of our time to take up arms._  
    

**What god drove them to fight with such a fury?**

  
  
If there was something of a contented sweetness to those weeks, if Maxime had allowed himself some small measure of peace, it vanished too quickly.  Isnard’s posturing at the lectern, his misplaced conservatism, soon blew through the streets of Paris like winter wind off the mountains.  Blew in like an ill-wind through the Convention, rattling its windows and making the gentler members of the Plain tremble like new buds on a sapling.  Maxime, from his high perch on the left, studied them like a farmer intent on seeing which fruit succumbed to sudden frost and which survived.  On his left, Marat growled like a beast and thumped on the back of the seat below, much to the visible consternation of the deputy occupying it.

“Ah, we Montagnards are made to survive such squalls,” Marat thundered, swinging his craggy, blistered face towards Maxime.  He gripped Maxime’s shoulder and used it to leverage himself onto his feet where he swayed alarmingly.  “Fuck you, Isnard!” he called.  “If I survived all the shit in the sewers with only this rotting skin to show for it, I can survive your petty intrigues!  Betrayer of the Revolution!  Betrayer of the people!  Fuck you, as you are trying to fuck this country- painfully and slow!  Clumsy as a virgin!  You keep slipping it out while you think of the king!”

Maxime frowned at the coarseness, barely tolerable in private but ugly in the place of the people.  He could not deny, however, that Marat spoke the language of the sans-culottes.  That when the Plain shook this time, it was with laughter.

Antoine, on Maxime’s right, leaned close.  The brush of his nose against the top of Maxime’s ear, the moist warmth of his breath against Maxime’s skin, the hand between his shoulder blades, seemed as devious a tactic as any that Antoine might have learned in the National Guard.

“You shudder.  I feel it,” Antoine whispered.  “But do you see their effect?”

“Of course.”

“Steady.  Marat is necessary as cauterising fire to a wound.”

Antoine had made so deep a sortie into Maxime’s physical space that he would not turn for fear their mouths would meet.  For fear, or want.

“You speak as though we share one mind,” Maxime said, making hasty retreat behind the worn and tired shield of his reserve.

“I confess, sometimes I forget we do not.”

Antoine’s words, then, a curved smile against the shell of Maxime’s ear.

 

**A dark glance and the headstrong runner answered him in kind: "Shameless -armored in shamelessness- always shrewd with greed!**

 

The Jacobin Club tossed on the wake of the Girondins’ speeches.  Side to side they rocked, pitched about by mere words.  All the members, it seemed, were lost in cursing or prayer, given over to transports of emotion fueled by their compatriots.  Driven on by Marat, ever quick to claim his own martyrdom and stir up rage.  He was like a man who, unfit for training a dog to hunt, instead trains it to be a brute: beast unleashed upon the streets to bite at shadows, fit only to be put down by cold-hearted rogues.

At Maxime’s side, Augustin shifted seamlessly between fear and boyish enthusiasm for adventure.  Couthon, meanwhile, looked almost bored as he was forced constantly to duck rude blows as other members gesticulated wildly or lurched about, heedless of Couthon’s stature in the wheelchair. As for Maxime, he observed the situation but found no words to speak: it had become, within these last hours, a place he did not know, filled with those who spoke Marat’s rude tongue.  Only Saint-Just remained tall and unbending, looking down his long nose at any overzealous man who attempted to engage his attention.  He turned to Maxime and bent to his ear.

“Make them yours, Citizen,” he said.  “We spoke of cauterising fire, not conflagration.”

 _Make them yours._ How easy a thing to say for a man with the voice of an Apollo and the youthful beauty of a Ganymede.  For his part, Maxime found better comparison of himself with Furibon in d’Aulnoy’s tale.  Even so, it would not do now to sit back and allow this upheaval to continue, directionless, even if he had wanted to.  He had, he reflected with some small pleasure, at least enough approval amongst them to command their focus, even if it did take him a few times to be heard.

“Our dear friend, Marat, is right in all he says,” he called, to applause and the bobbed acknowledgment of Marat’s shaggy, turbaned head.  “We must applaud his courage and tirelessness.  We must applaud the true patriots amongst us, those who are united in common cause: that of liberty and equality for all, not the few.”  He swallowed, daring to risk a glance at Antoine, waiting directly before him as always, as though to say that to succeed Maxime must only walk towards his light.  “Who are united, as we are, in fraternal love, which will guide us to our destiny as it walks hand in hand with virtue.”

He paused to let the crowd murmur and cheer and nod, to mutter amongst their neighbours.  In the audience, Camille and Danton stood.  Like a dancer, Camille rose on tip-toe, dwarfed by his master, delicate hands encompassing those huge shoulders as he smirked and whispered in Danton’s elephantine ear.  A curdled, hollow imitation of Antoine’s tender encouragements.  It was but momentary, yet Maxime felt their mockery like a brand that would eternally mark him.  Jesus, he thought, must have felt the sweetness of Judas’ mouth every day upon the cross.

 _Go on, Maxime,_ Saint-Just’s expression seemed to say when he gathered courage to meet them again.  _Do not wander…_

“It is our duty, in the face of oppression and tyranny, to revolt.  It is our duty to engage in insurrection, to defy them until the very last drop of our blood is spilled.  To make this insurrection constant, unyielding, eternal if that is what it demands of us.”  Maxime paused, gripping the edges of the rostrum.  His legs ached, his chest heaved.  It was too hot and cold at once, and the infernally tight buttoning of his coat compressed his chest so he could hardly breath.  Still he made leaned forward and swept the faces of the crowd with his gaze.  “If I am called to do so, then I will climb the steps to the guillotine.  I will be shot on the barricades.  I will be the first to fall, if it is so decreed by the Supreme Being that guides us all.  But I ask you now, which of you will go with me?”

He was answered by a roar, a great wave of voices and applause that crashed over the club and drowned them all.  Here then, he thought, were the Achaens of old, awaiting battle.  It took but little to light their kindling, still less to fan it.  Saint-Just leapt to his feet, applauding with hands held high.  Where others might have seized the rostrum, Saint-Just seized the floor.  He rounded on them, one hand braced upon the edge of the rostrum as his fierce, dark eyes swept the assemblage.  It was a clever strategy, for if Maxime had brought focus to the gathering, then Saint-Just would drive the point home, each building upon the other to bank the fire.

 _Marat is alone,_ Maxime thought.  _That is his weakness._

It was not a thought he would have entertained a year ago.

“Citizens, listen,” Saint-Just called.  “Citizens, hear me now!”

They did not, of course.  Too used to the fray and banter of the club, too filled with the excitement of possibility.  The mood reminded Maxime of the day of the Tennis Court Oath, when anything and everything seemed open before them.  The noise faded a little, only to be truly blunted by Marat hollering for quiet, Maxime motioning the same instruction to his own corners.  If Saint-Just resented their intercession, he gave no sign.

“Every man here- yes, and woman, too- of patriotic virtue, has spoken of morality, of friendship, of the pure goodness of the heart.”  He paused.  From the rostrum, Maxime saw how his chest heaved with the force of his words and breath, the purity of rage that suffused them.  “And do we not feel them: Brissot, Pétion, Isnard, Vergniaud?  Do we not feel these false friends, I ask, as we might feel the prick of a thorn or the burrowing of a tick?  They will take our blood, then blame us for the spilling of it!”

The gathering redoubled its rage, then, as though with sudden realisation.  As though Saint-Just had formed their emotions into words, and need only fuse word to action.

“They would shame us! The People!  Accuse us of threatening the peace, of spoiling their dinners, of an impoliteness of speech and manner, of disruption!  I echo Marat, I echo Robespierre, and I say: disruption is our duty, when corruption is deemed a lesser crime than impoliteness!  Has ever the man of privilege calmly given away those undeserved benefits that he dares call ‘rights’?  No!  He will say wait a month, and we will talk.  Wait a year, but ask nicely.  Before we know it, after another hundred years have passed, we will lift our heads and ask: where is the Revolution?  They will answer you: ask again, from your knees.”

A quiet lingered such as Maxime rarely witnessed.  It was as though Antoine had captured their hearts and minds so aptly that he had robbed them of voice.  Marat sat nodding, David beside him.  Even Danton, who so rarely listened to any voice but his own, seemed ensnared by this speech.  As for Camille,  Maxime would not, could not, look lest he be forced to face some ugliness there.  He was certain, however, that the younger man watched, and that this admiration of Saint-Just’s swift tongue would only poison the journalist further.

“In the early years of our Revolution, so-called ‘great’ men condemned actors for their low morals, impugned their character, ascribed to them a wantonness such as might put a Nero or a Caligula to shame.  I say there is more honesty and less pretense, more virtue and purity of spirit in the painted actor who dances bawdily and sells their body to put food on their table, than there is in the true actors: the ones who will turn our very Revolution into performance with the Conventions as no more than some absurd stage.”

“Citizen,” David shouted.  “Will you name them?”

“I name these actors Brissot, Vergniaud, Roland, Pétion.”  And he, Saint-Just, like an actor himself, held out both arms to the Jacobins as though to embrace them.  “Shameless, they would call the actors of plays and operas.  Is it not shameless to wear the cloak of liberty, as the wolf cloaked himself in fleece: to move throughout the flock and sate his vicious greed!  Are we to believe, then, that this is what it is to be free?  To be told: ‘be silent, do not defend the sanctity of your life, even as a tear out your throat?’  My friends, I ask: what revolution is this?  Make mine a revolution of the People.  Make mine a revolution such as good Marat and Robespierre spoke of: one that understands that insurrection is for the People, when the government has shown itself to be for despotism.”

The business of the night thus concluded, the entire mass of Jacobins- deputies, members and audience alike- swarmed to the speakers.  How greatly he wanted to approach Antoine then, though he had no words to adequately convey his admiration, how many turns of phrase he would remember for his own writings.  His was a great and secret joy, an entirely unselfish pride.  He held on to that sensation as another might hold some precious token, even as Augustin dragged him into the crowd of his own admirers.  Fenced by heads and shoulders set taller than his own, Maxime caught only glimpses of Antoine, gathered in by the younger men who lionised him, mauled by praise, the arms slung ‘round his neck, the hands that pressed his back.

Danton appeared before Maxime then, like a great bear that had danced too long in the circus: his face carved with ancient scars and marks of illness, his beady eyes filled with a sorrow barely eased by the scant months since Gabrielle’s death.  He attempted a smile, but upon such a face it only succeeded at grotesquery.

“It was a good speech.  You kept it brief,” Danton said, pawing Maxime’s shoulders as he forced a wet kiss upon each of his cheeks.  He jerked his head towards Saint-Just.  “His remarks were good to.”

“Yes, they’re feting him for this, M-Maxime,” Camille, joining them, put in.  His mouth was a thin line slashed across his face by an angry hand.  “B-be sure he d-d-doesn’t b-become addicted to the sweetness of their d-devotion.”

“He spoke well,” Danton said firmly.  Then, when Camille had sauntered off, “Our children will devour each other, Maxime.  And not in such a way as I would pay a good few sous to watch.”

“They are, neither of them, children.”

Danton sighed.  He draped his thick arms over Maxime like a yoke, bending to put their foreheads together.  The weight was almost unbearable.  Maxime felt as though he suddenly carried all the man’s sadness on his own meagre shoulders, even as he supported their physical burden.  Danton smelled of wine and sleepless nights.

“My friend,” Danton said.  “I’m tired.”

Maxime did not quite know how to answer, or why it fell to him to do so at all.  Because Camille could not?  Because, for all his rage and spite, Camille was more often joy incarnate?  ‘Their children’, Danton had said, as though both they and their younger deputies mirrored one another, each believing their own side more real.  He had no answer to it then, or none that would satisfy, and so he merely put his hands to Danton’s arms and kissed one meaty jowl.

“I am here,” he said.  “As ever, Danton.”

“Yes.  You are a good man, Maxime.  A true friend.”

With that, Danton collected himself again and trundled off into the crowd, only to be replaced by Saint-Just and David, Augustin bobbing along at their sides.    

“Your words, Citizen Saint-Just,” Maxime began.  “They came from your writings on the Constitution.”

“Some.”

Saint-Just’s voice was husky, worn raw with its sheer force.  A voice, Maxime realised, that would haunt certain of his dreams and the sleepless hours before dawn.   

“You spoke…” Maxime hesitated.  The night, his odd conversation with Danton, seemed to have drained him even of words.  “Brilliantly.”

“I am fortunate in my teachers.”

“I flatter myself that I am one.”

“Better to say all.”

Augustin spared Maxime the significant risk of looking a fool by choosing this moment to interject.

“David says he will make a painting of our Antoine.”

“Citizen Saint-Just,” Maxime corrected absently.  “And I can think of no one more deserving of portraiture.”

David pushed a nervous hand back through the thick tangle of his hair.  “Not quite a portrait.  A painting.  Your brother suggested the theme.”

Maxime turned to Augustin.  “Oh yes?  And what is it to be?”

“Maxime, you should know.”  Augustin grinned, the rascal.  “Have I not always contended that our Antoine would make a fine and mighty Achilles?”             

 

 **Son of Menoetius, soldier after my own heart, now I think they will grovel at my knees…**  


There were so very many times in the long Spring of 1793, when it almost became possible to forget war, because still there was art.  As a child, and even now as a grown man, this visual world seemed a great mystery to Maxime.  Perhaps it was because of his own deficient sight that, though he had tried his hand at sketching, he had as much success with the brush as with his singing.  Unlike Marat, however, who constantly teased David for his ‘shit splatters’, Maxime understood its value: how oft the fine mixing of colours created harmony within the viewers’ soul, how it made one consider the past or value some profound act of heroism.  One day, he supposed, when the Revolution itself had passed into history and France begun to mend, it might well reflect all that was worthy in a people released from injustice.

Perhaps it was this fascination, rather than an entirely less virtuous type of curiosity, that at last drove him to visit David’s studio at a time he was certain Saint-Just would be there to sit for him.  

David's rooms, and the studio in particular, were so different from Maxime’s own.  Where his own chambers were the very picture of ordered simplicity, here motes of dust and powdered wood stirred on unseen currents of air, passing through beams of candlelight.  The smell of wood lingered along with varnish and the earthiness of freshly mixed paint.  Maxime passed by scattered, presumably unsalable, sketches; beneath aging commissions, gargantuan in size, that had perhaps once been painted for some distant nobleman.  The aging boards protested even Maxime’s light step upon them as he drew closer to the sound of David’s voice, warning both artist and subject of his intrusion into the sanctity of this space.  If they were prepared, however, there was nothing to prepare Maxime.  Nothing in the world, then, to stop the halting rush of his breath.

“Shh,” David hissed.  “Don’t move, Maxime.”

As though Maxime could.  As though he were not utterly transfixed.

Antoine stood draped in Grecian style, his skin rendered still fairer by the blue ( _indigo_ , the rational part of Maxime’s mind helpfully supplied) cloth.  His bare foot was braced against a broken, overturned box that on David’s canvas had been transformed, as if by magic, to a broken part of wall.  In his right hand he clasped a staff that represented Achilles’ spear, while he rested his opposite arm upon his knee.  With each breath, Maxime counted the gently defined lines of his ribs, made study of the shifting muscle of his chest and the steady rise and fall of his breast.  The pose left most of the long line of his thigh bare.  Every flex of his foot or curl of his toes showed the muscle there in new light.

 _How,_ he wondered, _can David possibly choose in what manner to draw him when each moment shifts his beauty?_

Meaning, he supposed, that if it were himself he might waste every year of his life drawing some new wonder that had come to his eye.

“You have not made our friend into Ares, then?” Maxime dared ask.  It was a poor jest and sharpness of his voice almost made him shudder with distaste.

“Achilles still,” David grunted, eye never straying from his work.

Once, Maxime had thought David tempted by his model of Hector.  To see him now so focused upon his work ought to have been comforting.  Instead Maxime thought only of the hours that must follow each session, the wine set near the dressing screen, the nearness of David’s bed to this very room.  Maxime had promptly banished the image of his own hands on Antoine’s slim thighs, and yet he could imagine David’s coarse, gnarled ones gripping and parting them with such precision that he ached at the thought.  In suffering or sympathy he could not quite decide.

Maxime cleared his throat.  “You don’t mean to suggest my dear colleague has a weakness?”

“Friendship.”

Just as in the Convention, the club, so too Saint-Just’s voice suffused every corner of the studio.  It curled warm and rich around the whorls of Maxime’s ear and settled in them like deafness.  He heard nothing else, attuned to Antoine’s voice as Brount to the whistle.

 _Patroclus,_ Maxime thought, _yes._   The name brought to mind an earlier painting of David’s: a naked, muscular youth, his shoulder turned to the viewer to both shut them out and draw them in.  Then, as now, David’s model had more ethereal beauty than any man should bear.  It was but a small jump to imagine Saint-Just posed similarly, how his long curls would brush his shoulders and his body be made to appear both shield and weapon.

“You don’t mean to suggest,” Maxime said, “it is the bonds of fraternity, not the capriciousness of gods, who broke him?”

“Love,” Saint-Just said simply.  “Love without vertu, Citizen Robespierre, is an empty sheath, or a blade untempered and dull with sentiment.  What do you say, David?”

“I say I will not love you anymore at all if you cannot stop talking.  Though…”  The artist sighed and stood up, flexing his knuckles and stretching his back.  “It’s enough for now.  What do you think, Maxime?”

And here was David again: no longer the exacting artist but the friend, the devoted patriot, seeking reassurance of Maxime’s approval.  It took some time to give it: Saint-Just had unfolded from his bent posture and faced them with one eyebrow cocked, a smile playing about the corners of his mouth.  Maxime turned his gaze to the sketch if only to avoid the lines and hollows of Antoine’s collarbone, the dusky brown of a nipple peaked in the chill evening air.

“I think you have captured Saint-Just’s very soul in so few lines,” Maxime said, meaning every word but barely attending to the painting.  “He is like a true Greek warrior, as no one alive can claim today.”

“Paint us both, Jacques,” Antoine said, shocking Maxime with the familiar address, the commanding tone.  “Robespierre and I.  I am not the only one who admires the lessons of the past.”

“I fear I make nothing but a poor Hephaestus.”

“Make him Lycurgus,” Antoine replied, without so much as a glance at Maxime.  “And crown him in laurels.”

“And you his student, I suppose?” David answered slyly, gaze shifting between them.

They spoke a secret language now: one of alleyways and shadow, denial and leavings before dawn.  Maxime shifted uncomfortably at such talk, at Saint-Just’s sharp wit.  They were not mocking him, yet the words fell on him like the jokes of old schoolmates, like Danton’s loud insinuations and Camille’s laughter.  He imagined himself, thin-legged and fine-boned, too short by half and too mired in philosophy to be anything but a mockery on the canvas.  Neither anyone’s idea of a teacher, nor anyone’s idea of a lover.

“It seems to me there is no need for such fine drapery,” Maxime said, harsher than necessary, always thoughtless in moments of terror.  “Your Achilles is nature itself.  You might as easily dress him in vines and crown his head with flowers.”

 _I have said too much,_ he realised.  

Perhaps they both had.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mid-July, Paris, 1793. The people have lost their friend, and the delicate balance between both factions and individuals has been overturned. In the midst of grief, allegiances and friendships- both old and new- shift and Maximilien Robespierre must consider whether it is the past or the present that offers the solution.

**…no one, not while I am alive and see the light on earth, no one will lay his heavy hands on you…**

  
  
With the summer of 1793 reaching its zenith, it seemed apt to Maxime that Louis XIV should have been called the Sun King.  Like a king, the July sun was by its very nature an oppressor.  As crops withered in the fields its rays beat down upon the city of Paris and, indeed, all of France.  Every step one took kicked up puffs of dust, leaving the streets immersed in a choking cloud, white as the explosion from a burst bag of flour.  Even the great oak that sheltered he and Antoine in Spring no longer offered escape from that angry star.  The stream where Maxime once cooled his legs was now all but dry, a few unhappy minnows awaiting death amongst its puddles.  Everywhere, the heads of the people bent beneath a brutal monarch they would never overthrow, even as the Revolution itself marched ever onward: the Convention released from the shackles of the Girondins, the Constitution adopted ( _ours_ , Antoine had breathed, like a proud and wondering father).  
  
Perhaps this building oppression, lanced only by summer squalls, was what made Maxime so uneasy.  It was, after all, a perfectly ordinary July evening.  He had spent it as he so often did: a light dinner and coffee, a long walk with Éléonore, Philippe and Élisabeth in the cooler evening air, then upstairs to work ‘til tiredness overtook him.  Somehow, though, he still could not rid himself of the vague, directionless fear that prickled his skin like sweat.  A terror, he thought, of too much happiness.  When at least he found sleep, that same terror twisted his dreams into monstrosities.  
  
Maxime woke to blindness and rolling thunder: deep night, steps pounding up the outer staircase.  Each heartbeat tumbled over the next as he lay shaking off sleep and nightmares.  Lay until the steps ended in a thud, like a bird’s headlong flight into glass, as someone struck the locked door to Maxime's study.  It was not until Antoine shouted his name, heedless of the late hour, that Maxime flung himself from bed.  Tripping first on the hem of his nightshirt, then over his uncooperative legs, he stumbled through bedchamber and study to pull wide the door.  
  
“Saint-Just,” he gasped.  
  
In the dim light of the wall sconces Antoine looked no more than a feverish youth: face pale but for the hectic flush high on his cheeks, forehead beading with sweat, curls in disarray.  His cravat and collar- indeed, even his coat and vest- were missing.  He stood before Maxime in shirtsleeves, one stocking slipping down his calf where he had failed to tighten a buckle.  Maxime might have laughed.  He might have dared to pull him close. Might, were it not for Antoine’s expression.  
  
“Maxime,” he said, quiet as the threatening storm.  “May I…?”  
  
“Of course.  Please.”  
  
As he made way, Maurice Duplay’s polite knock came on the study door.  Once Maxime had delivered a sincere apology and assured his landlord that there was no imminent threat to his life, Duplay- always generous when it came to the business of the Revolution- was kind enough to light the candles in Maxime’s rooms.  He gave no more than a quick glance at Antoine, a dip of the head that acknowledged their shared embarrassment at his state of dress. 

The light swelled, leaving the entire world no more than warmth and radiance.  Once it had subsided somewhat- meaning, once he could see again- Maxime settled his glasses upon his nose and turned back to Antoine.  He felt terribly naked, terribly cold, of a sudden: his thinning hair without its customary wig, his feet bare, the bandages around his calves visible beneath the hem of his nightshirt.  He considered asking but a moment to fix his dress.  Instead he watched Antoine sink down onto one of the chairs, clutching hard the edges of the seat as though his very life depended upon that grip.  
  
“My friend,” Maxime began, in half-hearted reproach.  “Citizen…”    
  
He got no further.  A violent trembling overtook the younger man even as Maxime spoke, beginning in his tightly clenched hands and spreading like virulent contagion throughout his body.  With Antoine’s head lowered, Maxime saw no more of his face than the hard clench of his jaw; each time it eased, the clacking chatter of his teeth became audible.  Rendered fearless by fear itself, imagining him genuinely ill, Maxime crossed the space between them.  Dared put his hand to Antoine’s cheek.  His fingers, burrowing in the tangles of Antoine’s disordered hair, discovered first the heat of his scalp.  His palm found damp skin cool to the touch, the high cut of a cheekbone, the night’s rough growth of stubble.  
  
“Please, let me send for Dr Souberbielle.”  
  
“Can your physician perform resurrections?” Antoine asked, only then looking up.  
  
“I…”  
  
“Marat is dead.”  
  
Maxime stared, uncomprehending.  The words, spoken in his own native tongue, sounded foreign to his ears.  
  
“Impossible, Antoine.  Impossible.”  
  
“Tonight.”  
  
“Marat is…”  
  
_Immortal,_ he almost said.  A man who had been threatened with death a thousand times, who had almost met the guillotine, who had crawled amongst the sewers until their rot spread to his skin: what else should he be?  And if he were not, what did it mean for mere mortals?  
  
“He is dead.”  
  
Maxime gathered breath to speak, though it took a moment longer to find words.  When he did, he almost believed them.  “There are so many conspiracies, my friend, surely…”  
  
“What, then?  Did I imagine that bloodstained woman, Simonne’s very sister, in David’s studio?  Did I imagine her tender tears and her screaming?”  
  
“Antoine…”  
  
“Did I imagine that he tore his hair in grief?  Did I imagine his moans?  Did I imagine David’s hands beating against my chest in his rage?” he demanded.  Up onto his feet, then.  He pulled aside the front of his shirt, exposing a sprawling red mark above his heart that would bloom, on such fair skin, into deepest blue and purple.  “Here is proof, if you require it.”  
  
“Stop.  You must…”  
  
“I ran to you,” Antoine said, quieted now but still frantic and babbling.  “What, Citizen Robespierre?  Did you think childish rage brought me to your door?  My thirst for blood?  My unfeeling Stoicism?”  
  
Antoine’s hands closed around Maxime’s with a gentle press like a question.  Up, then: his wrists, his forearms, his biceps.  Each breath burned Maxime’s throat, mingled with Antoine’s, impossibly loud in the narrow confines of the study.    
  
“Warm,” Antoine whispered in a tone half of wonder, so that for a moment Maxime wondered if he was speaking to him at all.  And then, “Even through your shirt.  And here…” The deputy’s fine-boned fingers, the light scratch of his nails, slipped along the sides of Maxime’s neck to settle against his racing pulse.  “Warmer still.”  Those hands moved again, holding his face as effortlessly and gently as a child might hold a robin’s egg, thumbs sweeping over the pitted smallpox scars.  “Marat is dead,” he whispered.  “You live.  I had to see it for myself.”  
  
“Antoine.  Cease.”  
  
What was he saying?  And oh, wonder, how broken and pleading his voice sounded in his own ears.  Even so, Antoine obeyed immediately.  
  
“I transgressed,” he said, collapsing in on himself, a collection of shadow and light and sharp angles.  He drew himself up to his full height.  It was like watching an actor pull on the mantle of their costume, how swift he cloaked himself in reserve.  “Forgive me.”  
  
“It is forgotten,” Maxime said, proud that his voice produced so sharp a blade.  That he had mastered himself enough to deny the desire coursing through his veins, thick between his thighs.  “Wait.  I will dress and we will go to Marat’s to see what has happened.”  
  
Safe behind his bedroom door, the weight of just these last few minutes fell entirely upon Maxime's thin shoulders.  Marat, dead!  And then Saint-Just’s desire, his most ardently unspoken confession, as bold as a stroke of lightning and just as electrifying!  Maxime was swollen with it- his lips, his sex- as if reduced to a mere youth again.  He paced, now pushing his fingers back through his hair, now biting the heel of his hand to stifle his frustration.  
  
It took him some moments to collect himself enough, even, to dress.  He emerged to find Antoine slumped back in the chair, his expression one of such preoccupation that Maxime almost apologised for so disturbing him.    
  
“Citizen Robespierre,” Antoine began, his voice as dead and dry as the parched earth.  
  
Maxime held up a hand for silence.  And then, without fully considering the decision- if such it could be called with no thought involved- down he went upon his knees and took Antoine’s right foot onto his lap.  He let his fingers touch the dirt-streaked silk that had coiled about the young deputy's ankle and thought again of poor Furibon in the company of Léandre.  He might mount a case to defend the ugly, bedeviled creature: how well he must have loved the beautiful prince, how must the constancy of their companionship driven him mad with longing, how must all evil action that followed be a mere warping of that ardor.  Maxime cleared his throat.  He hooked his fingers in Antoine’s fallen stocking and began to roll it back over the hard curve of his calf.  
  
“My dearest friend,” he murmured. “If you doubt anything, it must not be the sincerity of my regard.”  
  
He paused, fingers trapped in silk, pressed strong against the warm grain of Antoine’s skin.  The muscles tensed, a curling of the toes that Maxime felt through the worn sole of the younger man’s shoe.  He pressed bravely onward, higher, until he reached the base of Antoine’s knee.  Promising himself that this would be the last lapse in judgment, he bent forward to press his parted lips where silk and skin met over bone.  _How thin and coarse my mouth must feel,_ he thought.  _Well, let him understand that I was hardly made for kissing._  
  
“Or rather,” he amended.  “Do not doubt the sincerity of my devotion.”

"Devote yourself to life instead," Antoine said, as Maxime pressed the silk up beneath the hem of Antoine's culottes and secured it there.  His voice was light, like the beats of a drum on which the skin is drawn too tight.  "Men die too easily."

  
  
**…Anguish gripped Achilles. The heart in his rugged chest was pounding, torn...**

  
  
There was a man, lifeless hand still clawing for help and his poor, bony breast streaked with gore.  
  
There was a man, brackish, sightless eyes staring down at the knife so near his heart.  
  
There was a man, his expression beatific as Corday posed above him, knife held like the spear of the centurion who pierced the side of Christ.  
  
There was a man, broken, held dying upon the lap of a grieving woman.  
  
There was a man.  There was Marat.  His image, crafted in such rushed, fierce strokes that they had ripped the paper, lay scattered everywhere at David’s feet while he sat working.  Simonne crouched in one corner, barely seeming to register their presence, much less the growing number of pilgrims who had turned the silent, sombre mood of the house into a farcical mockery of her sorrow.  She wept without making a sound and occasionally touched her husband’s hand as though to be certain that it remained lifeless.  Each time, David’s jaw tightened.  He offered no rebuke, nor did he blink or turn aside.  He sketched constantly, like some dread automaton, though his hand must ache with the speed and pressure he used.  Only when Antoine approached did he pause.  The moment Antoine's hand fell upon his shoulder, David turned to rest his head against his hip and let his shoulders tremble with buried tears and bitten breaths.  It was, Maxime thought, as though David and Simonne were strangers meeting only through sad circumstance.  As though the spheres of their grief were too circumscribed to be shared, so that Simonne must turn to her sisters and David to Antoine.  As though the greater part of understanding and sympathy did not lie between them.  
  
As for Maxime, he knew the proper forms to observe as noblemen once knew every step of the quadrille.  Knew, too, that less welcoming eyes watched all he did, divining some direction or other from his every gesture.  He murmured appropriate yet feeble condolences to Simonne, who accepted them with a nod as habitual and repetitive as his own useless words.  His gentle reassurances to David came far more easily, for though he knew the depth of conjugal love between Marat and his wife, he felt no part of it.  He better understood that the world had, by prejudice and vile aspersion, exiled David from this moment.  That he had no place here but the one where he sat, inscribing Marat’s last moments- moments he had also had no share in- onto his very heart, so that each line and shadow came as an extension of the very blood in his veins.  David might as well have opened those veins there before them, for the effect would have been much the same on Maxime’s aching eyes and tired heart.    
  
A familiar tightness began in Maxime’s chest as he stood there.  Each sentence exerting greater pressure, as with the winding of a tourniquet.  He was coffined by his clothes: the fit of his coat, the noose of his cravat.  His stomach heaved and rolled, the thin light in the room seeming to expand while the sourness of blood and rot thickened.  When he blinked he saw Marat’s hanging jaw, the stretch of his arm from the edge of the tub.  
  
_A different room: simple, homely, golden light through Arras lace woven by his mother’s own hand.  Her white arm dangled over the edge of the bed as though reaching for him, and he too young and small to answer her silent summons.  When he eventually dared enter and take them, he found those supple fingers- the very same that once taught him to sew- now stiff and cold, unyielding and dark at the very tips.  July heat made the smell of rot and feverish sweat and all the odours of the body linger upon the air so that being in her room felt like crawling back inside her very body.  She lay like a doll thrown down upon the bed, discarded by her maker when her body could give no more children to France.  Black blood on the sheets, soaking the front of her dress at the juncture of her thighs (”it never stopped,” he overheard his aunt whisper, “even after the baby…”).  The women of his family spoke of her in hushed tones, with reverence, as though the manner of her death had turned a Mary Magdalene into a Mary Most Blessed._  
  
“Excuse me, please,” he said.  
  
He did not run, and the restraint of walking made his limbs tremble.  He was vaguely aware of moving past Camille and Danton in the salon, Camille’s worried voice tilting upward into a question Maxime never parsed.  Then he was alone in the courtyard.  He braced his forearms against the coarse brickwork and scraped his heated cheeks against the cool stone until they felt almost raw.  Released from memory and the oppressive weight of that small room, Maxime wondered, idly, why Simonne displayed such quiet acceptance.  To mimic the style and substance of men’s grief?  To prove herself Marat’s equal in taciturn strength of wit and character?  Maxime thought that if he had the particular freedom of women in these matters, he would wail until his very heart ceased.  _If it were **him**_ , he thought, and could think no further for fear that even the momentary image of Antoine’s death would weaken his very bones.  He did not weep, but he felt the tears behind his eyes like the threat of rain from swollen clouds.  
  
But a moment later, Antoine’s steps approach in a rhythm so calm and even that Maxime felt himself instantly comforted.  The younger man made no move to touch him, but stood near enough that Maxime felt the radiant heat from his body.  
  
“It is trivial,” Antoine said, after they had stood in silence for what seemed like hours.  “We make idols of ancient men.  Dress in their costume to ape them in state and honour.”  
  
“The arts have always held a mirror before us,” Maxime said, relieved to speak of something other than death.  “They suggest how we may be greater than we are.”  
  
“Dead histories.  Dead languages.  Dead men.  I know no martyr braver than Marat, no deputy greater than you.  And yet we will have Achilles and Hector, Brutus and Caesar.”  
  
“I confess, though: I did not understand Achilles until I saw you in his garb.”  
  
Antoine scowled and turned his face up to the clouded sky.  His eyes, as ever, were wide and defiant.  “A spoiled boy who rapes and enslaves and murders.  A child who turned his back on the people out of pure petulance?  A brute so self-indulgent that he would not notice his own friend’s grief and courage until it was too late?”  
  
“You paint your image with the insults of your enemies.  I saw Achilles with the eyes of a friend.”  Maxime swallowed, every word seeming too like the confessions he once made in church.  “I saw you with the eyes of Patroclus.  And if Achilles were truly so unworthy, how could worthy Patroclus admire him so deeply, even, as to give his life as much for him as for their people?”  
  
“Marat was no less worthy than Achilles,” Antoine said, voice bitter.  “He also had his Patroclus.”  
  
“And his heel?”  
  
“The _patrie_.  The people.  If he had loved them but a little less…”  
  
“If he had loved them less he would not have been Marat.”  
  
“He was indulgent.  Like a hen who does not notice that one of her eggs is rotten, but will persist in trying to hatch it.  He let Corday enter, when Simonne would deny her.”  
  
“He was Marat.”  Maxime smiled, though it felt cold and thin across his face.  “Besides, one day we too will pass out of living memory, and there will be art and stories of us, as long as there is still humanity.”  
  
Antoine laughed at last.  “What will they make of us, I wonder, these children of the future?”  
  
“They will not forget your beauty.”  
  
“I had rather they not forget my words.”  
  
“You mistake me,” Maxime said gently, seeing his friend’s face now clouded as the sky.  “To me these things are inseparable: your words, your courage, your form.  When I spoke of beauty I meant all of your virtues.”  
  
_What they will make of us,_ he thought, as Antoine turned to look at him, _is that in the midst of death, even, we were at our most vital._  
  
And smiled to think it.

  
**But let them both bear witness to my loss. . . in the face of blissful gods and mortal men…**

  
“This is obscene,” Antoine hissed.  “May we not put him in his tomb already?”  
  
Maxime, standing at Antoine’s side beneath the vaulted ceilings of the chapel of the  Cordeliers Club, barely suppressed his agreement.  Beneath these stones that once echoed with a thousand prayers, beneath the stained glass windows with their panoply of saints, he had never felt further from God.  Despite the wonders David had tried so admirably hard to stage, despite the richness of the late afternoon light, he could not help but feel that both the God he had been raised to fear and the Supreme Being of his own nature and conception, had turned their eyes from this abominable sight.    
  
_This,_ he thought, _is how martyrs are made.  It is an ugly thing._  
  
In some simple ways the staging of Marat’s memorial was reminiscent of Lepeletier’s not so long ago.  The bare and wounded chest, the ceremonial exposure of the body.  Here, too, was David’s unrivaled eye for beauty and a richness of meaning: the living green of Marat’s oak crown contrasting with the red of his wound and the white of his robes, the broken stones of the Bastille (as though it were his hands and feet alone that had crushed them), the rousing warning that he would be avenged carved by David’s own hand.  And yet the entire image seemed to Maxime as sad and ugly as the time he had discovered all his mother’s lacework moldering untended in a wardrobe.  Though Marat had been embalmed and his body routinely washed, the dictates of certain natural processes could not be checked in the midst of summer heat.  The smell of rot had permeated every corner of the former church, and flies buzzed around the ears of all the assembled throng.  And Marat’s heart- oh, horror!- they had taken that most sacred part of him, that best part of him, and separated it permanently from his body as though it were some holy relic or an object to be possessed.  
  
As for the mourners, they were as much a mockery of love and grief as the slaves once burned on their master’s pyres, or the women hired to bewail great personages.  Of course there were the tears, perhaps some of them even real, but more often than not there was only a pushing and shoving amongst the pruriently curious.  Every minute there came exorbitant wails and curses, calls to violent retribution, there came representatives who had criticised Marat most wildly during life now sobbing like little children.  Contrast, then, Simonne’s grave and shadowed face with its hard-set jaw and harder gaze.  David, who seemed never to leave Marat’s side, who silently touched Marat’s urn or washed his body and spoke no louder than a hoarse whisper.  Sorrow and mere fakery now posed side by side, yet it would be the loudest and most garish who would come off as having been truly moved.        
  
This was madness and despair masquerading as veneration.  Achilles delaying the funeral pyre for Patroclus ‘til that grieving ghost returned to chide him.  It was a mockery of all Marat held dear, for while he had been content to die a martyr this shameful display would have roused his most vehement anger.  
  
“The people must have their chance to grieve,” Maxime finally replied, though it were only rote response.    
  
“They must have their bread,” Antoine said.  “But there is no more need for circuses.”  
  
There were many things Maxime might have said to such a quip, clever thought it was.  He still had his reasoning, after all, his books and his histories that he might have called upon to justify this atrocity.  Antoine, however, had already taken himself off.  Maxime glimpsed him through the shifting bodies, his face set and stern, his shoulders squared like a man marching into a wild gale.  His absence was immediately filled with leaching kisses and hard embrace, people tugging upon Maxime’s clothes and dragging at his arms.  A great hand, heavy as an anvil, fell upon his shoulder.  
  
“Maxime,” that unmistakable voice rumbled.  “We must talk now, my friend.”  
  
“This is a time of mourning, not politics, Danton.”  
  
“Everything is p-political.”  Camille this time, and Maxime felt himself captured.  “Besides, you are not here to m-m-mourn either.”  
  
They flanked him, Camille and Danton, Danton’s hand firm against the small of his back and Camille’s light upon his shoulder.  Maxime found himself in a shadowed corner far from the crowd, his back pressed hard against the stone wall.  He looked up at them.  Danton’s expression, once masked in the affable mimicry of friendship, was now hard and unforgiving.  Camille’s face was as gentle and pitying, yet lacking in mercy and fellow-feeling, as some avenging seraph.  Maxime looked up at them and saw the guillotine: Danton its monstrous structure, Camille its blade.  Each sound from out their throats was the whispering fall, the thud, the cheer.  
  
Cloaked in lengthening shadows, they spoke.  Or Danton did, rather.  He spoke, elegant and forceful as ever, of a ship now tossed on violent seas.  He spoke of Hébert and the dangers of his extremism.  He spoke of the great gap, ever widening, opened up by Marat’s assassination and who would fill it.  And then Camille began, speaking a civilian’s version of the language of war, speaking of alliances and the loyalty of good men, speaking of enmity and judging the greater of evils.  Speaking, to Maxime’s ear, of capitulation.  Camille, always the lover, the giving one, the man of tender affections, embraced Danton with one arm, his fingers curving with contented familiarity around the man’s broad, bullish side.  The other he stretched towards Maxime.  They were close enough for Camille’s hand to rest easily on his arm, half invitation, half threat.  There was nowhere to escape from his grasp and so Maxime merely resisted it.  Met Camille’s gaze and hardened his face against the disappointment there.      
  
“Come, M-maxime,” he said.  “Let us k-kiss and make everything as it was again.”  
  
“Have you your master’s permission to make such an offer, Citizen Desmoulins?”  Antoine’s voice broke the silence between them all.  “What, Marat not yet in the ground and already you begin your intrigues.  Is this how low the Revolution has stooped in so few years?”  
  
They broke apart, then, Maxime feeling the relief of it like some trapped beast escaping the hunter’s clutches.  Even Danton stepped back as the two younger men faced one another: Camille, his head high even as he wrung his hands like a schoolboy.  Antoine, his expression entirely devoid of mercy, though the silver stain of dried tears lingered near his eyes.  
  
“Dear child, are those tears? I c-confess, Saint-Just, I thought you as cold and indifferent as a t-tyrant.”  
  
“Camille,” Danton warned.  
  
It was too late though.  Maxime might have spared Danton the trouble of attempting to reason with Camille if he thought the man would listen.  Camille, however, had already taken a full step forward so that his chest was almost flush with Antoine’s.  Distracting, to see them so close, like two young harts squaring to draw first blood.  Neither shifted his gaze.  
  
“My G-god, but you are beautiful.  Maxime is right, we might have been brothers.”  Camille put out his arms, though he was not foolish enough to close them around Antoine.  “Let us embrace, then, for sorrow’s sake.  We should love each other, after all, for dear Maxime.”  
  
“Camille,” Maxime hissed.  “Desist.”  
  
And yet it was Antoine who lunged forward.  Who plunged both hands into Camille’s dark curls, so like his own, and kissed his cheek with such brutal tenderness that Maxime barely dared breathe.  His chest tightened and oh, but his heart ached as though they had both closed their hands around it, as though they would tear it from him to be displayed like Marat’s.  Antoine’s fingers unclenched from their grip on the back of Camille’s skull but he allowed no more quarter than that, still holding him tethered by the ends of his hair.  A part of Maxime held out hope that this was enough, that having proven himself the two would now relent.  They might not share a path, but at the very least their roads would not collide.  
  
“My word, you are not cold at all, our dear young Spartan,” Camille said, the shock of the moment seeming to have momentarily knocked the stutter from his mouth.  He cupped Antoine’s face in his hands and pulled him so close their noses almost brushed.  “Such eyes you have: unbearable.  Why, were it not for your writings, we might make of you a ‘Blessed Virgin’ rather than a martial Achilles.”  
  
 “You every word is perversion.  You are nothing but a looking glass to a dead time, and being possessed of no natural sentiment, you must make a mockery of mine.”  Antoine bent his head almost politely and brought the ends of Camille’s hair to his lips.  “So be it.  Only let me cut a lock of this, for I swear you will not need it much longer.”

  
  
**And moved at the sight, the good soldier Patroclus burst out in grief with a flight of winging words…**

  
  
With Marat interred at last, their world returned by degrees to some small semblance of normalcy.  Despite Danton’s dire warnings there were, in those last weeks of July, no great upheavals.  In the short term at least, Marat’s death had brokered an uneasy truce.  Slowly but surely there came again to be dinner and card games, strolls in the Palais Royale and along the Seine.  Maxime returned to his performances and Antoine to his songs.  
  
Only Danton and Camille were absent.  
  
One night, having heard that Antoine would sit for David again, Maxime returned the artist’s studio.  He found both men mired in silence and sitting before the painting of Achilles.  The work was but partially complete, yet there was a lively defiance to the hero’s eyes.  The strong lines of his body seemed at any moment prepared to shift so that he might fully stand and aim his spear at oncoming Hector.  However, as fascinated as Maxime remained by those bare shoulders and thighs, the shadowy marks of his ribs, Maxime could not avoid the specter that watched over them.    
  
Marat was everywhere in that room: here the green rug from his very bath, the white of a misplaced turban.  Here were scattered unpublished pages of his writing, a loving note of admiration to David.  His face etched upon what seemed like a thousand papers pinned to walls and easels, dangling from pegs.  Marat, living and dead, angry and sorrowful, proud and transported by joy.  Marat bloodied, Marat diseased, Marat cleansed, Marat resurrected, Marat unburied.  The weight in the room was such that Maxime could barely lift his tongue to form but the most basic of greetings.    
  
“It is wrong,” Antoine declared of a sudden, his voice filling the whole studio.  
  
Antoine snatched up a dagger, lying discarded amongst other props a moment before, from the table nearest his hand.  He lunged and drove it hard through Achilles’ breast and ripped downwards.  Maxime heard his own horrified shout, David’s grief-tinged yell.  Antoine only stood before his completed handiwork, shoulders heaving.  
  
“Paint no more antique heroes,” he said.  “From now on, paint only good and true patriots.  Paint Marat.  Remember him.  Let all who see it know your love for him, even if they cannot understand it.”  
  
A great, wordless yell issued from David’s throat.  Before Maxime could gather his bearings, the painter leapt at Antoine, who did not even deign to turn around.  
  
“David!” Maxime shouted, pitching himself between them.  “You…!”  
  
The blow came as a shock to his mouth and nose, though at first he neither felt nor understood it.  The pain, familiar from his school days, came after, blooming along with the blood he found when he put a hand to his face.  He looked at it, bright red against the fragile white of his fingertips, and then at David.  
  
“Maxime, I…”  
  
Before Maxime could so much as motion the apology away, he found himself pushed aside.  Antoine caught the artist by the collar, bearing him backwards so swiftly that David tripped over his own feet and both men fell.  They remained like that: Antoine astride David’s hips like a painting come to life, his hands white where they clutched the front of David’s shirt.  
  
“Stop,” Maxime said, into the quiet.  “It’s a very small hurt, after all.”  
  
The moment Antoine shuffled back, David sat up.  He threw his arms around the younger man, pushed his scarred face into his chest, and wept so loud his howls filled the entire room.  
      

**But strike a pact with me, swear you will defend me with all your heart, with words and strength of hand…**  
  


“I understood something, when I killed myself that day.”  
  
Maxime, dazed and muzzy with the late afternoon heat, roused himself at those words like Eurydice following Orpheus from the Underworld.  It took a few moments more for him to wake enough to open his eyes.  He lay beneath their oak, Antoine sitting beside him so that they were shoulder to hip.  The younger man, still staring almost absently ahead, took out a small knife and pared a thin slice from the apple he held.  For a moment, Maxime wondered if he still dreamed or whether, perhaps, Marat’s death and all that followed were the dream.  The lingering tenderness of his mouth from David’s blow assured him that it was not, as did the sudden sharp scent of green apples from the juice running down Antoine’s fingers, his wrist, beneath the cuff of his shirt.  Antoine turned to him, and Maxime had to look away lest he catch sight of the longing in his eyes.  
  
“I realised I had tried so long to be this or that: the worldly satirist, the Stoic, the best of ancient heroes.”  
  
“You are yourself,” Maxime said, his voice still thick with sleep.  “That is enough- more than enough- for me.”  
  
Antoine merely hummed in agreement and cut another slice of the apple, so thin that its white flesh seemed almost translucent.  He turned over onto his side and leaned over Maxime, sunlight turning his tousled hair to dark copper.  He pressed the cool, wet flesh of the apple to Maxime’s mouth and Maxime- who did not at all admire the taste of apples, for they made his stomach ache- parted his lips to take it in.  If he could be proud of nothing else in all this world, then he would at least be proud of this: his eyes never leaving Antoine’s,  the moment when the younger man’s breathing hitched almost painfully in his throat.  Soon his teeth were at Antoine’s fingertips and then his tongue between them, gathering the last bite of flesh, licking the juice from Antoine’s skin. Maxime’s entire world in that instant was nothing but salt and sweet and bitter.  
  
The moment Maxime ceased to kiss his fingertips, Antoine threw himself onto his back with a laugh that was half boyish triumph, half pained frustration.  The sound brought Maxime up onto one elbow, reversing their positions.  He looked down on Antoine, his turned face, his hair tangled with bits of leaf and twig like some wild creature, the rapidity of his pulse visible at the bared line of his neck, the hardness of his sex defined by the close fit of his culottes.    
  
It took a significant act of will for Maxime to pluck the apple from Antoine’s hand, to mimic the cut he had made.  Antoine opened one eye and looked at him from its corner.  Only when the apple was at his lips did he turn his face back up.  Each bite he made was small, precise, and reminded Maxime of the other man’s almost cruel sense of artistry.  _Look,_ his expression, his very posture, declared. _See every moment of my pleasure.  Take it and make it part of yours._   The progress of this act was so deliberate that it was almost a shock when fingers finally met lips, more so when lips parted to accommodate the slim width of Maxime’s paired fingers.  Antoine sucked gently, tongue-tip beneath fingertip.  Maxime’s arm quivered and gave so that he bent over him, bracing their foreheads together.  His fingers came away wet, left a thin, glistening trail along Antoine’s smooth cheek.  
  
“I would die with you,” Maxime said.  
  
Antoine looked up at him, so close that the world seemed no more than the dark of his eyes.    
  
“I would die for you,” came the reply, simply spoken, as natural and obvious as late summer afternoons, sour apples and bitten fingers.  The sort of passionate declaration that it was permissible for men to make to one another, in this strange era when grief was a more suspect emotion than the desire for death.  
  
“The Revolution…”  
  
“Will wait while you kiss me.”  
  
The skin of Antoine’s cheeks was smooth as ever, only the faintest grain of stubble to scrape Maxime’s lips ‘til they were tender and swollen.  Each kiss they pressed upon one another drew closer and closer: the cheekbone, the cheek, the corner of the mouth- first Antoine’s, then Maxime’s.  Only then did Antoine’s fingers slip beneath the edge of his wig to tether themselves in the strands of Maxime’s hair.  Somehow it was that doting motion that undid him, so that he pushed aside his wig one-handed, heedless of his thinning hair and the growing encroachment of silver strands.  Antoine laughed- devoid of mockery, of anything but delight- and it was then that Maxime seized the advantage to kiss his parted lips.  Antoine struggled up onto his elbows, each press of his mouth hard beneath the soft, tasting of apples and summer, so much more than the cold consolations of philosophy or the ardent words of venerable heroes.  
  
Maxime lost all track of thought or time, only barely aware that such a thing must exist and have passed when Antoine finally sat up, his kisses turning gentle and chaste.  Antoine touched Maxime’s face then: its scars, the corners of his eyes, the places where his hairline had receded most.  Touched each spot as though it were the site of some small miracle.  Maxime might have snapped at him, accused him of some cruel jest.  Might have, but already knew otherwise.  For once, that sufficed.  Instead they sat silent for a time: Maxime with his arms wrapped around his knees, trying to ignore the little agonies it caused for his desire to subside; Antoine lying down, the heel of one hand pressed perilously close to where Maxime could still see the jut of his sex, his other arm flung over his eyes like a weeping youth.  When that arm finally moved, however, his eyes were clear and intent.  He sat up, reached out.  Maxime allowed himself to be pulled ‘round to face him.  
  
“I have been considering the nature of eros and agape,” he said.  “Whether they are really so divergent.”  
  
“Antoine…”  
  
“I have been asking myself whether our love could result in some breach of virtue.  Whether…” his hand now, intent, high on Maxime’s thigh.  “our love is so all-consuming a thing that we might forsake our oaths to the people for it.  That’s what you fear.  Not that making love is corrupt, that…”  
  
“That once I’ve known you, it will become impossible for me to…”  
  
“To have me executed, should it become necessary for the greater good.”  
  
“No!”  His voice was so loud that even brave Antoine startled.  Maxime shook his head.  “No.  I fear myself.  My response.  I fear that I would burn the entire nation to the ground if you died on mission, or if some faction rose up and destroyed you.  I fear that I would become the tyrant my enemies already label me.”  
  
“Would it be so different to now?  Would it really only take an act of physical love to change you so much?”  
  
“Now I can pretend that I will marry.  That I could accept your loss as David accepted Marat’s.  Once I have you- all of you- I will be able to pretend nothing to myself even if I might pretend for the people of France.  There must be boundaries, Antoine, or I…”  
  
_I will break like a sea wall,_ he thought, though did not say.  He did not think he needed to speak it, though, not with Antoine nodding, his mouth now fixed in the familiar line of deep thought.  He reached for the fruit knife, and before Maxime could object had pierced the tip of his thumb.  A small wound, though it instantly beaded with purple drops.  
  
“The Scythians mingled their blood,” he said, “to make an oath to one another, and blood is better than golden rings, fine words or a priest.  I swear that I will be your friend, to death.  I need no more.”  
  
“Your blood, Antoine, is too precious a thing to spill.”  
  
Yet even as he said it he had put out his own hand, fearless.  When the pain came it was a bright and shining thing, a relief as sudden and profound as the moment of climax.  He heard his voice, for he was not as accustomed to discomfort as Antoine, cry out.  Saw the sudden flash of hunger flair in the younger man’s eyes before it eased again.  
  
“To death,” Maxime said.  “Always.  Antoine I…”  
  
He got no further, for Antoine chose that moment to press their thumbs together and the ache of it startled the speech from him.  He stared down: joined palms, clasped fingers, and their mingled blood between.     

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Robespierre's Rooms/Marat's House:** Both are based on floor plans that I managed to find online (hence the outer door to Robespierre's room does not lead to his actual bedchamber- as I'd previously thought- but to a study through which the bedchamber was accessed). 
> 
> **Marat's Death:** Much of this stays relatively true to the events of Marat's assassination and what followed from it, however neither Saint-Just, Robespierre nor any of the other deputies (as far as I'm aware) went to his house on the night of the assassination. There's somewhat conflicting information about when David arrived, though obviously I have him going there more or less immediately. What is true is that he was asked to plan both the funeral and the painting that eventually became The Death of Marat. It is also true that Marat's body was in a state of increasing putrefaction before being buried on the 16th of July. Robespierre supported his veneration, however I think it's somewhat unlikely that any of the deputies would have predicted how truly grotesque the whole thing became.
> 
>  **David and Marat:** Were extremely close friends, though there's no historical suggestion this was ever romantic (at least on Marat's part). While some people consider The Death of Marat a work of propaganda, I personally consider it a work of profound love and loss.
> 
>  **The Oath Scene:** Is a nod to Saint-Just's _Fragments sur les institutions républicaines_ , in which he writes that men would declare their friendships in the temple during Ventôse. You might consider this, I suppose, a precursor to a concept that he would go on to attempt to codify.

**Author's Note:**

> Robespierre's writing, at various points, expresses a desire to be able to find a more personal measure of peace than he was ever allowed by the time. I've drawn on that while finishing this particular part of the chapter (helped along by it almost being Spring here).
> 
> His speech in the Jacobin Club- urging its members to revolt- is based on an actual event. To my knowledge, Saint-Just did not speak on the occasion as he tended far more towards prepared speeches and reports. His comments about actors, however, reflect him paying respect to an earlier speech of Robespierre's (in which he defended actors against charges of 'immorality').
> 
> Of course, Saint-Just did sit for David in 1793. Just not quite in this manner. The painting of Patroclus, however, is real.
> 
> Marat- While he was a member of the Cordeliers by 1793, he continued to have involvement with the Jacobins at the time of the Girondins. Hence there's a certain amount of 'mixing' between the clubs in this story, related to the political climate. 
> 
> Furibon- The 'malformed' son (versus the beautiful Léandre) in 'The Imp Prince'.
> 
> Son of Menoetius- A reference to Patroclus, Achilles' (older) lover.


End file.
